Three Things That Made Me Laugh This Weekend

Overview of a large weekend: Finished my temporary shitty cafe job at 3pm, headed in to Sydney Opera House for another full shift at 4pm. Home. Sleep. Opened the shop Saturday morning as I received a text from shop partner who was supposed to be taking over at 3pm so that I could head down to The Opera House for another night shift. He's been out all night and even though it's 11am he's still kind of out and can I please organise someone else to take over at 3. Lots of expletives. That squiggly vein on my temple throbs a lot. I call around but the backups have plans. I ask a friend who has never worked in the shop if she can do it and she proves what I have long suspected; she's a bit of an angel. I spend the first couple of hours in the shop writing out instructions and procedures. Then I flick my brain switch and write the review of the play I saw on Thursday, which is due first thing Monday morning. I hit The Opera House at about 4.30pm. Finish at 10.30pm. The Dreaded One and I have planned to go to a psytrance night but don't actually get our shit together until about 4am due to the high level of nonsense we are talking whilst blobbing on the couch. We go to the club and have a couple of hours of fun. Back home at around 6am and prepare to go to a psy party in the park. Make it there at around 11am and have a blast. Serious fun. It is going until 10pm Sunday night but I have an Important Meeting with a Cool Dude on Monday afternoon (which I have just returned from) so I attack the day early with the intention of straightening up enough to be Mr Charming Pants for The Cool Dude. We get home around... sketchy on the details here, but I did have the strength of will to leave what was a pretty damn fun party early. Fell asleep on couch. Woke self up with inadvertent finger poke to the eye due to sleepy head nod. The Dreaded One laughed at this. Food appeared. Ate. Drank wine. The Dreaded One fell asleep so I poked her in the eye and laughed at that. Made it to bed at about 10.30pm, having packed in rather a lot.

So the three things that made me laugh?

At the club for our brief appearance. Dancing. Loads of Israeli's who love their psytrance almost as much as the Brazilians do. They're all pretty drunk. I feel disturbingly sober. Still, it's fun in a messy kind of way. Spilled booze makes it the stickiest dance floor ever.

At one point this big wall poster comes away from the wall and wafts down to the floor. It sits on the sticky floor, just being all big and white and oblongular. There's a girl dancing just in front of me, dancing just on the edge of the poster, so I tap her on the shoulder and say, "Excuse me - you have a little piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe."

She freaks out a little and looks for the little piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe. I say no, this piece of toilet paper and wave my arms at the poster. She gets what I mean and doubles over laughing. She looks up at me as she laughs and I laugh too, and isn't that the best feeling? Making someone laugh like that.

Then her boyfriend who has watched this without knowing what was so funny comes over all possessive and wraps his arms around her and starts snogging her. And I'm thinking it's cool, dude, I didn't want to put The Big Kahuna inside your girlfriend, I just made a joke.

Second thing that made me laugh... at the party in the park there are these weird sculptures scattered around the place (it's a psytrance party so there are also lots of scattered people scattered around the place). They look like elongated doughnuts... or like big eggs with holes through them (and yeah, I'm talking about the sculptures, not the scattered people). Someone tells us that earlier in the day someone was taken to hospital because they tried to dive through the hole through the middle of the sculptures and split their head.

Like, I feel for them and everything, but this is exactly the kind of shit tripped out psy-people are doing all the time, so I can't help but laugh (and it's just reminded me that I still haven't told you about the tripper who tried to make friends with the ostrich). And looking at the hole they tried to dive through, it's not exactly small. In fact it's so big that I consider having a go at diving through one myself... but I have an Important Meeting with A Cool Dude the following day and I don't really want to explain that the fresh stitches in my face are a result of trying to jump through the hole in the middle of a giant egg in the park.

Third thing that made me laugh... talked with lots of people in the party in the park Had a really good conversation with a lovely girl called Jocey. Music's pumping, people are stomping or sitting around talking and laughing, everything good. We're having a really good chat about lots of stuff. Standing there chatting. Listening. Talking. Not moving. The ground, being a park, is big and green and flat. It is also not moving.

Suddenly Jocey starts flapping her arms about and kind of teetering like she's a tight rope walker. I'm a bit stunned because I have no idea what brought it on. Her arms do spastic windmills in the air and she bends at the waist, first one way, then all the others. Her back arches backwards and she bends fully until she is touching the ground with her fingertips. She stays like this for several seconds while I helpfully stutter, "Erm... what... are you... is this a normal thing... um..."

Jocey finally kind of springs back to a standing position, looks at me, giggles a bit and says, "That was close."

"What was that?" I ask. "What did you just do?"

"I've had vodka and I think I just fell over. Happens all the time. Friends tell me they don't know I'm drunk because I hold myself together so well, but sometimes I fall over."

I've just remembered more things that made me laugh. You'll have to come back another time.